The present invention relates to a printing device having a spelling check function for checking whether a printed word is correctly spelled or not, more particularly, to a printing device further having a function capable of ceasing printing operation and shifting a print ribbon from its print position to its rest position in case that a misspelled word is detected by the spelling check function, so that an operator can easily confirm the misspelled word.
A printing device employed in an electronic typewriter and the like is usually provided with a print mechanism including a carriage horizontally movable which is supporting a print head and a print ribbon and effects printing operation on a printing medium such as a print sheet and the like through the print ribbon in response to the data inputted through an input unit such as a keyboard or the like.
This print device is sometimes provided with a ribbon lift mechanism which shifts the print ribbon from a print position (upper position) at which the print ribbon is confronting the print head to a rest position (lower position) at which the print ribbon is not confronting the print head to enable characters and the like printed to be visually confirmed. In many cases, this type of the printing device is usually provided with a print ribbon drive control mechanism so that the print ribbon is kept at the print position while data are continuously inputted and the print ribbon is kept at the rest position when the data input operation is interrupted.
The printing device having the above spelling check function is provided with a dictionary memory storing spelling data of many words in advance in such a printing device having the above ribbon lift mechanism and a spelling check operation for checking whether words are correctly spelled or not by searching the dictionary memory is executed.
Conventionally, by the above spelling check operations, it is determined that a word is incorrectly spelled, an occurrence of the incorrect spelling is generally informed to an operator by generating an alarm or the like. When, however, the alarm based upon incorrect spelling is generated, the operator sometimes has been already effected the succeeding operations. In this case, since the print ribbon is kept in the print position, there is a problem in that the operator is difficult to confirm the portion of the word which is incorrectly spelled.